Limited Edition 180 Gram Audiophile Remaster 3LP Set

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Passion is the eighth studio album (and second soundtrack) by English rock musician Peter Gabriel, originally released in June 1989 via Real World Records.

Some artists – particularly those at the peak of their careers – might view a soundtrack commission as a marginal side-project, something to be dashed off while you concentrate on your main album. Not so Peter Gabriel. For him, soundtracks have always been epic projects,which he can dive into and paddle around in for years. Often he’d spend more time on them than on his multi-million-selling albums, meeting collaborators and developing methodologies that would have a profound effect on the rest of his music.

Gabriel spent much of the three years that followed So soundtracking Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ. Set in first-century Palestine, filmed in Morocco and drawing from revisionist source material, Scorsese’s epic invites a geographically and historically confused soundtrack, and it’s why Gabriel’s timeless, pan-global score works so well. It draws from the Fourth World experiments of Eno and trumpeter Jon Hassell, but Gabriel keeps things delightfully confused by mixing up synthetic textures, tribal rock percussion and authentic performances by star musicians from India, Pakistan, Senegal, Armenia, Iran and Egypt.

“A Different Drum” (where Gabriel shares wordless vocals with Youssou N’Dour) and “It Is Accomplished” (where Billy Cobham leads a charged drum stomp over a triumphant piano riff) almost stand up as proper, straight-down-the-line Peter Gabriel pop tracks that wouldn’t sound out of place on So or Us. There are also more ambient tracks like the hymnal “Bread And Wine”, or the miniature “Open”, where Gabriel’s wordless vocals weave in and out of L Shankar’s swooping violin solos. There is the stately, baroque chamber piece “With This Love”, where Robin Carter’s cor anglais floats over synthetic chord washes. Best of all might be the title track, where Gabriel, Youssou N’Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan all take turns in invoking a numinous spirit with their melismatic voices, while trumpeter Jon Hassell and L Shankar provide ghostly countermelodies.

Passion won awards and seemed to kickstart the nascent market for what had only recently been christened “world music” (it even led to a companion album, Passion Sources, featuring some of the folksong and religious music that had inspired Gabriel). Passion certainly helped to popularise assorted global musicians in the West, with artists as diverse as Armenian duduk virtuoso Djivan Gasparayan, Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy and Iranian santur and kemanche specialist Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh all using it as a useful stepping stone.

This triple 3LP is the 2017 Limited, numbered 45 r.p.m. half speed remastered album housed in a gatefold sleeve with reproduced original artwork, side F etching, and digital download, pressed in Europe on 180-gram heavyweight vinyl.